most recently, we moved to nevada off of the in-playlist on to the leaning democratic list as it becomes clear are the polls and the early voting statistics that president obama was filling out a pretty strong lead in that state. host: so as this map comes together, what tatestate does the los angeles uses to determine? -- los angeles times uses to determine? guest: we use a mixture of things. early in the process, you are relying on republican polls. as the process goes along, two other things factor into it. one is the reporting that our political staff does. we've had reporters in all of the battleground states as the campaign goes along and traveling what both of the presidential and vice presidential candidates. so we get a lot of information from our reporters and that's -- that factors into the map and once early voting gets started, we've been tracking the early vote and that was particularly important in nevada. it was also important in north north carolina. for a while, we have moved north carolina off of our battleground list because it seemed like the public opinion polls wer